The service said that 1,962 people, 132 and 18 of whom were sentenced to custody in pretrial and youth detention centers respectively, had been released by January 17

MOSCOW, January 21. /ITAR-TASS/. The criminal justice amnesty marking 20 years of the Russian Constitution freed 336 people in its first month, the state Federal Penitentiary Service reported on Tuesday.

The service said that 1,962 people, 132 and 18 of whom were sentenced to custody in pretrial and youth detention centers respectively, had been released by January 17.

Another 167 were freed from detention by the federal court and criminal investigations on their cases closed while 19 were released from house arrest. The other 1,626 of the pardoned had been serving a non-custodial sentence or were registered in the penitentiary service’s database.

Some 476 people, 358 of whom were serving a non-custodial sentence and another 50 held in detention centers, were released within six months of the earlier "economic amnesty" on business and entrepreneurship crimes, passed by the State Duma lower house of Russia's parliament in July 2013.

The other 67 of those pardoned were released from pretrial detention facilities and one individual was freed from house arrest.